A “Jules et Jim” style love story set against the background of the Surrealist revolution.

September 1908. 27-year-old Gabriële Buffet – a musician, an free-spirited young woman and a feminist before her time – meets Francis Picabia, a successful young painter with a scandalous reputation.

He needed his art to head in a new direction, she is prepared to break with convention: to inspire, theorise and be thought-provoking. She becomes the “woman with the erotic brain” who has men on their knees, including Marcel Duchamp and Guillaume Apollinaire. Moving from Paris to New York, Berlin, Zurich, Barcelona, Étival and Saint-Tropez, Gabriële guides the precursors of abstract art, the futurists, the Dadaists, always at the cutting edge of artistic innovation. This book transports us to the beginning of the Twentieth Century when the codes of beauty and society were reinvented.

Collaborating intimately in both content and writing, Anne et Claire Berest tell the story of their great-grandmother, Gabriële Picabia, the surrealists’ muse.

A literary retrospective of a crucial period in modernism—the transition from Dada to Surrealism––via portraits and encounters with its literary lions, including Joyce, Proust, Reverdy, Apollinaire, Crevel and more by the co-founder of the Paris surrealist group.

Poet Alan Bernheimer provides a long overdue English translation of this French literary classic—Lost Profiles is a retrospective of a crucial period in modernism, written by co-founder of the Surrealist Movement.

Opening with a reminiscence of the international Dada movement in the late 1910s and its transformation into the beginnings of surrealism, Lost Profiles then proceeds to usher its readers into encounters with a variety of literary lions.

We meet an elegant Marcel Proust, renting five adjoining rooms at an expensive hotel to “contain” the silence needed to produce Remembrance of Things Past; an exhausted James Joyce putting himself through grueling translation sessions for Finnegans Wake; and an enigmatic Apollinaire in search of the ultimate objet trouvé.

Soupault sketches lively portraits of surrealist precursors like Pierre Reverdy and Blaise Cendrars, a moving account of his tragic fellow surrealist René Crevel, and the story of his unlikely friendship with right-wing anti-Vichy critic George Bernanos.

The collection ends with essays on two modernist forerunners, Charles Baudelaire and Henri Rousseau. With an afterword by Ron Padgett recounting his meeting with Soupault in the mid 70’s and a preface by André Breton biographer Mark Polizzotti, Lost Profiles confirms Soupault’s place in the vanguard of twentieth-century literature.

Philippe Soupault (1897-1990) served in the French army during WWI and subsequently joined the Dada movement. In 1919, he collaborated with André Breton on the automatic text Les Champs magnétiques, launching the surrealist movement. In the years that followed, he wrote novels and journalism, directed Radio Tunis in Tunisia, and worked for UNESCO.